writings as “Protestant Christianity” reflecting the context of the Chinese original.
The very first article in this collection speaks to two of the questions raised above. In 1939 Professor Chen writes of the contribution of the Chinese Protestant Church to the building of a “New China.” From the Sun Yat-sen revolution of 1911 through the “May Fourth Movement” of the 1920s (1919) and succeeding years, in spite of foreign invasions and competing “War Lords” inside China, Christians were part of the struggle for social, political, cultural and spiritual renewal. (Sun Yat-sen of course was himself a Christian.) Chen affirms in this essay the Christian work for “peace, justice, purity and truth.” This work is not narrowly confined to members of the church. The Christian understanding is that God is loving parent of all humankind, “so that all people on earth are compatriots, brothers and sisters. In this unified and great family, all of us as God’s children should love each other and cooperate with each other in order to create a great fellowship. The construction of a new China should take such a view as its foundation.” Certainly evangelism, sharing the Christian story and values, is a responsibility of the churches. Equally important, Chen wrote, is the work of education, healthcare, and social service in rural and urban areas.
The breadth of Chinese theological thought shown in this first essay is picked up again in the next two, but with a very great difference. “Theological Construction in the Chinese Church” reflects the post-revolutionary context of the 1950s. The article here includes further comments written in 1991 when the article was republished. This essay along with “Reconciliation with the People” (his 1981 presentation at the Montreal world conference on “A New Beginning” for China and the churches) has quite a different flavor. The Protestant Church in China had moved forward on the “three-self principles” of self-support, self-administration, and self-propagation. Independent from western missionary budgets and oversight the Protestant Church in China emerged as a vital community participating in the cultural, political and social re-birth of China. Professor Chen writes about how weak the theological foundations in pre-1949 China were, but fortunately he and others were able to lay the ground work for a Protestant Church in China that could both affirm its patriotic Chinese heritage and confidently witness to a Christian faith that was true to the Gospel but no longer foreign to China.
Professor Chen’s theology responded to the challenges presented by the triumph of a Marxist revolution that officially espouses scientific atheism along with socialism. The 1939 essay by Dr. Chen already expressed an approach for working with people of varying world views, seeing all humanity as one family. People do not need to agree in order to work together. Although some Christians in the West may see Christianity and American style capitalism as inseparable, others in China and elsewhere see socialism as more compatible with Christian faith and ethics. In “Reconciliation with the People” he writes: “Our point of departure is to opt for the people, to opt for the welfare of our country, and to opt for a social system that is more just and humane than anything the Chinese people have seen in our history of over four thousand years.” (Of course he acknowledges that the social system in China has imperfections.) He states that God sides with the poor and oppressed, therefore all who side with people, atheist or not, side with God. Professor Chen also seeks to express Christian theology in a way that is congruent with Chinese culture and philosophy. He writes in this 1981 article that “to conceive of the cosmos as an evolving continuum of creation-evolution-salvation-consummation” under a Sovereign God of the universe and history, “would not prove too unacceptable to the Chinese mind.”
In his 1956 essay on theological construction Dr. Chen suggests that one way to do theology is to see God and Humanity as two centers of an ellipse. Theology sometimes leans in a theocentric direction and at other times becomes more humanocentric. The dynamic interaction between these two foci has propelled theology forward. He notes that though this geometric metaphor is quite useful it also has limitations as do all metaphors. Humanity and God are not equals. Also theology moves forward so cannot be confined to an elliptical pattern.
Interestingly, in a note to the republication of his article in 1992, Professor Chen comments that he was happy to see Karl Barth also use the metaphor of the ellipse with God and Humanity as the two foci (in Barth’s 1963 book The Humanity of God). Professor Chen’s original essay goes on to use the metaphor in dealing with several theological problems—God and humanity in religious thought, the relationship of revelation and reason, the Trinity and Christology. Chen finds the metaphor to be an especially helpful tool in relating theology to Chinese culture and thought.
It is necessary for Chinese theologians to do theology in their own context. Chen ponders the problem of how “theology can sum up the religious experience of the Chinese church.” In the 1950s the Protestant Church in China had arrived at a new selfhood. It was as if the eyes of Chinese Christians were suddenly open. They began to look at their own religious experience as a starting point for theology. Chen first traces the tension in theology from the very early church on, between emphasizing the continuity or the discontinuity between humanity and God. At times God is seen as “Wholly Other” and humanity as totally fallen and depraved. In this view God is “unreachably high, inaccessible to reason, and infinitely exalted.” At the other extreme is an easy flow between humanity and God that allows Christians to find God in nature, culture, and in the broad efforts of human beings to create a better world. In this view God “lives among us as an affectionate, loving and forgiving” parent.
After reviewing this theological struggle from the first century down to the twentieth century, Chen raises the question of where Chinese theology is in all this. The awakening of the Chinese theology in the 1950s came at a time when much of the theological world outside China emphasized a Neo-orthodox position that emphasized an extreme discontinuity between humanity and God.
Professor Chen notes that the two views are not entirely mutually exclusive. Christians in China however reject the extreme discontinuity and seek a way that is more open to understanding “God’s creative wisdom and saving love” as “good news for all humankind.” Just as the Bible announces that “the coming of Christ” means “the good news that the human race would exist in harmony and peace, making God’s glory shine over the whole earth.”
This theological attempt to express faith in terms relevant to the philosophical and scientific culture that emerged in China and encourages Christians to work for the common good with others regardless of their world views creates other challenges. The most difficult problem perhaps is that many Christians in China take a much narrower and exclusivist view. Especially poor and uneducated Christians often see the Christian community as over against a dark and evil world. Even many educated Christians are more comfortable with a fundamentalist world view where the church is seen as the only pure community. Outside the church, in secular society and in other religions, they see only darkness and evil. This makes it difficult for them to work with people of other faiths or world views.
On the one hand leaders such as Chen try to express theology in broad terms and affirm that Christians can work cooperatively with those outside the Christian community. But on the other hand they also try to avoid alienating the many Christians with a more narrow view of the world. The national church leaders work very patiently with those whose faith rests upon a limited set of fundamentalist doctrines, trying to bring them into dialogue so that there can be a mutual respect while working out their differences. In “Self Propagation in the Light of . . .” he explains how over a period of thirty years the old western founded mainstream denominations and indigenous but exclusivist and sectarian groups have been united. In the past some of these groups had fought each other and condemned each other. Now they have moved toward theological thinking that will “transcend denominationalism, promote church unity, mutual respect, mutual learning and mutual enrichment.”
Chen Zemin comments on the interest in Protestant Christianity among university faculty and students in China. Some of these scholars developed an interest in Christianity from their study of history and philosophy, not from contact with the churches. The term “culture Christians” is used by some to describe those who adhere
